For the longest time after I landed in Halifax Nova Scotia in October 1999 to attend Dalhousie I couldn’t bond with the place. I couldn’t see an in, and so I couldn’t see an in to Canada. It was a place which appeared devoid of content – in every sense of the word. Streets were named after trees and not after historical or cultural figures. There was no public transit to speak of. You couldn’t find a soul on the downtown streets of a windy Sunday evening. It was a city that had no bakeries – and hardly any shops outside the downtown core – a place where, even if you rented in the well-off South End, you were likely to find yourself in a food desert. A city on the Atlantic ocean, yet it had the one solitary fishmonger, requiring a bus ride up the Bedford Road. Its untreated sewage went straight into the harbour. It had virtually no galleries or theatres. To learn more about the place, I picked up the Halifax’s biggest daily, the Herald, one day and on its front page above the fold was a story about a local guy who made a world record by stuffing an unprecedented number of plastic straws in his mouth. Was this place for real? I loved my coursework and the university, but outside it everything was in a thick fog. This was a city that marked its slow moving time in catastrophic accidents: the Halifax explosion; the Westray mining disaster; the plane crash near the Peggy’s Cove. I almost scored one myself on a personal scale: the rooming house where I and several other students rented caught on fire due to some electricity snafu caused by one of the top floor tenants. There’s probably still in some newspaper archives a picture of us on the pavement in our slippers, listening to the fire marshal explain when we can go back in, as that was when the photographer who turned up took a snap.
I’ve gradually learned that Nova Scotia’s non-diversified economy was of a parochial, clientelist kind, reliant on the resource (over)extraction – the kind which was just talking hold where I came from, the countries in transition at the ruins of Yugoslavia. It was a society where it mattered who your grandfather and family were: exactly what I was trying to escape. It had high unemployment (also familiar), extensive and entrenched government sector (hello Montenegro). My scholarship was good, but after international tuition fees and the rent, I had about $80 a month to live on. My visa did not allow for any kind of off-campus work. I lost interest in research. I graduate and then what, look for a job in Halifax? That’s it, I tried Canada, we didn’t get along. I was 26 and slowly going mad.
For the life of me I can’t remember now how it was that I managed to focus long enough on local politics to discover Alexa McDonough. Did I read some interviews, see her on TV? Was there a political ad in the paper? Something in the Coast? Somehow against all odds I had managed to notice the Halifax MP, and I remember emailing her constituency office to introduce myself, international student in a PoliSci program, to volunteer in some capacity. Miraculously, the executive assistant replied and I think within weeks, Anne Marie, Antony and Phyllis, her constituency office staff, had a plan for me. It might have been a hour or two of archiving or photocopying and collating or whatever, but I finally had somewhere to go and something to do.
Since I didn’t blow it, I was given other stuff to do occasionally. I’d find myself with some of the staff or volunteers in church halls and school gyms for silent auctions by local associations. I’d meet new people. I’d be given rides home. I had no idea what a financial planner is when I first met Alexa’s son Justin, but I pretended that I had. (Waiiiiit. There are people with so much money in so many different baskets that they need a planner to sort it all out?) An election came – it was the 2000 election which wasn’t a fortunate one for the federal NDP – and I offered to volunteer and was given what I thought was a substantial responsibility: answering the constituency office phone and directing people to their voting place by postal code. In the evening I was to go to one of those myself and join other volunteer scrutineers and count the votes. None of Alexa’s staffers cared that I wasn’t a citizen: I could still practice the instruments of citizenship and was given them without hesitation. Why did these people tolerate me? I was probably uncommunicative, brooding, my English awkward and still trapped in a foreign syntax. Yet they didn’t seem to notice.
I began reading about the NDP and was intrigued by its history. Tommy Douglas and the War Measures Act. Agnes MacPhail. Rosemary Brown. Grace MacInnis. Woodsworth and Strangers Within Our Gates which has aged terribly. Ed Broadbent. Stephen and Avi Lewis. The Prairie socialism. The United Church. The Red Tories. People were pouring out of the books. At one point I thought a chapter of my thesis should be about women of the NDP and I schlepped a dozen books to Alexa’s home and interviewed her while we leapt from source to source. Alexa herself, I thought, was stunning. Those piercing blue eyes! Where else do social workers come this charming, is this a Canada thing, I began to wonder? (John Doyle, another immigrant, apropos Trailer Park Boys and Letter Kenny, mused if we’re in essence a nation of decent hosers. OK but I’d add sexy social workers as another constitutive category.) If you watch the Meredith Ralston NFB doc Why Women Run, about the 1997 election when McDonough returned the official party status to the NDP and gained a good number of new seats – it’s obvious from the first images. She lands in Halifax as if from another, much more glamourous movie than the rest of the characters, and the colours shift. She always looked to me as a jock among the nerds, a popular girl among the dweebs. Some of it is of course the platinum sheen of the old money and a charmed and well-rooted upbringing. But it wasn’t only that.
As Stephen Kimber’s authorized biography of Alexa McDonough out later this month confirms, a lot of people of both sexes have indeed been charmed by Alexa into joining the NDP cause, even when it seemed hopeless. There is also much to be said for being positive and optimistic by constitution; a lot of politics is completely irrational and dwells in visuals, moods, sentiment, and conscious or unconscious preferences, and being an optimistic knockout, as the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau learned in 2015, will always come in handy. Kimber documents the other side of the McDonough story equally well though: her relentless, unglamourous work of building the party on the mainland from absolute scratch. That meant forming constituency associations, meetings, policy drafting, finding the right people, asking them to get involved even if they know that there will be no patronage appointment for them at the end. The trouble with socialism is still that it takes up too many evenings, like it did in Oscar Wilde’s time. The young and middle aged McDonough has happily given her days and evenings (and possibly her marriage) away to a project that appeared hopeless and might not have worked at all. ‘I’d prefer to read another policy paper than go to the theatre’ she’s quoted in the book as saying to someone, and it’s a hard thing to relate to, even perhaps to like, but it brought to my mind Iris Murdoch’s thoughts on goodness. There’s something extremely tedious about being good, she’d said, but we must pay attention and find ways to do it. No glamour, no direct pay off. Answering the call of the situation and not going off to make or consume art, which is, as is novel writing, this brilliant novelist said, trivial in comparison. Which is it going to be: Robert’s Rules of Order with a bunch of area eccentrics each with an axe to grind, or opera tickets? You know? At one point near the end, when skillfully tackling the McDonough divorce, Kimber quotes Peter McDonough saying something to the effect that ‘Alexa’s friends from politics have no sense of humour, I just can’t handle’, as someone who’s hung out with way too many leftists of all variants I screamed at the page JFC I know.
But the only way with meetings is through, not around. The most substantial part of Kimber’s book covers McDonough’s years in the NS legislature and the building of the party, developing the relationships and allies, planting things that will bear fruit only many years later, fruit like the first NS NDP government long after she retired from NS politics. Never mind the NS of the nineties: NS of the eighties was even weirder. No women in the leg, and elections in any given riding pretty much a face-off between a Grit and a Tory with sporty nicknames (aaaand in this corner, it’s Badger vs Sandy). MLAs treating themselves to pay bonuses for non-existent committee attendance. Jobs for the boys rampant. The topic of abortion best avoided. Labour standards few. Politician scandals shabby (forging your landlady’s signature on receipts, for real?)
That’s the stage that McDonough enters when she becomes the first woman to lead a major party in Canada on any level. And she didn’t have to. She could have been a Liberal, like her brother or ex husband, and had an easier life, and a straighter career trajectory. She could have maintained connections with people of her class and represented their interests and benefited from them. There’s a telling moment in the last chapter when it transpires that the donors for the creation of the Alexa McDonough Institute for Women, Gender and Social Justice would have to be found in the union circles, because Alexa kept no close relationships with the regular kind of donor – the wealthy philanthropists and families. She followed in her father’s footsteps, and I’m left wondering how come the wealthy industrialist Lloyd Shaw became an ardent socialist and a CCF stalwart? They’re the last people expected to go that route. Why do they bother with the road less travelled?
The section on the federal portion of Alexa’s NDP leadership is shorter although Kimber does cover the most important events. Throughout the book he maintains a fine balance between the public and the personal, and the tone is usually just right: friendly and irreverent simultaneously. The book wears its massive amount of research lightly. When the timeline began to overlap with ‘my’ time, I naturally looked for events that I was present for, and the 2000 election is certainly there, but the NDP participation in the anti-globalization demonstrations in Quebec City is not, so here is my personal footnote about it: I was there too. Alexa flew me on her air miles and while in Quebec I hung out mostly with the staff and some MPPs from other provinces, in Ottawa, where everybody headed next, I stayed overnight in her condo on a street called, if memory serves, The Driveway and the day after she gave me a personal tour of the House of Commons. (I still have that visitor’s badge. I still remember the silliness and the noise of the Question Period. She’s right; it is like watching fake wrestling.) I think I’ve met Judy W-L in the HoC cafeteria, the Manitoba MP whose cross-party bill on fetal alcohol syndrome was about to be passed. At some point on that trip – possibly in Quebec, at a reception, if the NDPers do receptions – she introduced me to a Toronto city Councillor, some guy called Jack Layton.
When I graduated in 2001 – it did help along the way that I had people on the ground to impress, people who would ask how things were going – Alexa’s constituency assistant Phyllis Larsen insisted that she come to the convocation. So I too had somebody in the audience. She took some pictures and this is one of them. This is her car, and also her parking ticket.
Life of course has its ways of separating people, and within a few years after these events, we’ve all lost touch. Then I moved to Toronto. The NDP has since changed, and the Canadian left has changed. While the NDP has always had a healthy roughhousing between the identitarian left and the redistribution left going on, as well as a dialogue between history and bold imagination, the identiterians are so dominant in the party these days, the quality of thinking so uninspired, that I’ve stopped being an NDP voter some years back. NS NDP is now a party which avoids using the word ‘women’. Somebody must have argued that the term women is not trans-inclusive enough, and the decision-makers must have agreed. So the conversations on the left about women are gradually becoming conversations about ‘female-identifying people’, or just, vaguely, people. Goodbye, women, from the NDP radar -- in NS, in BC, and places in between. Does the existence of women have any basis in material reality or are women a thing of declaration and self-identification? The left will not be able to avoid this question for much longer.
But that’s by the by. Parties have ups and downs, and if the NDP survived the 1980s Tories and the 1990s Libs, it will survive the rise of the woke religion. I wish it to thrive. Whatever happens or has happened, Alexa & comp. circa 2000 continue to shine bright in my life across the decades. And I am still here, more than 20 years later, in this country of very decent hosers and sexy social workers, which has kept me, doesn’t mind me, and which I’ve made my own.
LP
Stephen Kimber’s Alexa! Changing the Face of Canadian Politics is out on April 20